


Routine Maintenance

by pendrecarc



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: F/M, Fuck Or Die, Past Nightingale/David Mellenby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-25 08:39:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10760661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: While Peter investigates a double kidnapping in North Herefordshire, Nightingale attends to an unpleasant and long overdue task.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Franzeska](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/gifts).



There were several layers of security at the Folly. Nightingale was intimately familiar with each of them.

The outer series of wards had been established in the ‘thirties in more-or-less their current form. They were stolid and workmanlike, straightforward to maintain—Nightingale had already begun instructing Peter on the fundamentals—and would likely take the Faceless Man all of five minutes to dismantle. That was all very well and good. Dismantling them would trigger an alert and activate the inner series of wards, which Nightingale had designed himself during that rather dull period from 1968-1973 when there had been very little to do but contemplate the inevitability of his own death and what that would mean for the future of English magic.

Nightingale was no David Mellenby, and he was no Peter Grant. He didn’t pretend to any great talent for experimentation or innovation. He had, however, access to one of the finest magical libraries in Europe, a lifetime of practice, and the sheer bloody-minded focus necessary to drill a hole through 100 mm of German steel, and into these wards he’d poured every ounce of resentment he’d ever felt at his own approaching obsolescence. Nightingale was willing to wager they’d take even the Faceless Man rather more than five minutes to dispose of.

He didn’t flatter himself they would hold forever against a prolonged assault. All wards could be undone. Of course, if anyone made it that far, they would have to deal with Molly.

Molly looked, at the moment, as though she’d welcome the opportunity. She’d been out of sorts ever since Peter left for Herefordshire. “Quiet, isn’t it,” he commented, and she paused in the act of laying out the preserves. She was still setting the table for four, months after this had last been necessary. “It’s been some time since it was just the two of us.”

Her eyes went to Toby, curled up on the rug.

He gestured acknowledgement with his teacup. “Well yes, there is that. I’d have gotten a dog years ago if I’d known you wanted one.”

She gave him an unimpressed look, which softened slightly at his smile. Then her head darted around to the door just seconds before he heard the creak of steps on the stair. When she turned back to him, ‘unimpressed’ had turned to ‘accusing’.

“And yes, there is that,” he said with a sigh. “I’m working on it.”

Molly set down the toast with rather more emphasis than was strictly necessary as Varvara Sidorovna walked in and favored them with a sunny smile. “Good morning. Full breakfast today? You spoil me.” She sat down opposite him in Peter’s usual spot.

“We do what we can. Thank you, Molly,” he said, noting the set of her shoulders, and breathed a little easier when she glided pointedly away.

Outer wards, inner wards, Molly—it had occurred to him that if the Faceless Man was looking to get around these, he had a very well-placed asset in the woman spooning raspberry jam into a cup of otherwise perfectly good tea. Nightingale would have been a fool not to be suspicious, but on balance he thought it unlikely Varvara Sidorovna was here as a plant. He hadn’t had any sense she was holding back in their altercation at the farm, and she’d made no threatening move since then. The strongest point against it, though, was that when Varvara Sidorovna had been captured, her employer had a much better-hidden asset already in place.

Nightingale did not look at the place setting immediately to his left. “I heard from the Met earlier this morning,” he said. “You’ll be pleased to hear they’ve decided to release the majority of your belongings so long as you’re under house arrest. They should be arriving soon.”

“Oh, good,” she said, looking genuinely pleased. “It isn’t that I don’t appreciate the hospitality, but your taste in women’s wear leaves something to be desired.”

The slightly too-short blue jeans and printed T-shirts had not been his own selection, but he suspected she already knew that. “They’ve made no progress on a trial date, unfortunately.”

“So eager to get rid of me?” She grinned at him over her beans and toast. “At least it won’t take long once it’s started. Shocking, how long it can take to enter a guilty plea.”

“You don’t seem terribly bothered at the prospect of decades in prison.”

Varvara Sidorovna shrugged. When she picked up her teacup, the iron bracelet he’d forged slid down her wrist. “I’ve got decades to spare. You know how it is.”

He did, at that, but it didn’t mean he wanted to waste any of his borrowed time locked away from the world. Not any more of it than he already had.

At the moment, he didn’t have much choice. With Peter out of town and a criminal practitioner under his own roof, he didn’t dare leave the Folly. Which brought him to the last and most complex series of wards. These were overdue for routine maintenance. He’d been putting it off for months, reluctant to expose his apprentices to the process. Reluctant in general, to be honest. But he was running out of time and out of excuses.

After breakfast, Nightingale retreated to the library in search of any references to odd goings-on near West Mercia. It seemed unlikely that the Folly would be able to supply any details Hugh Oswald could not, but while he waited for Peter to report in on the results of that interview he might as well attempt to be useful. It was not the best time for him to be the sole representative of the Folly in London, so the faster Peter could close this case, the better.

And there were two children to think of.

He was neck-deep in one of Giraldus Cambrensis’ lesser-known works when the bell rang. Molly showed in PC Guleed. “Hello, Sahra--to what do we owe the pleasure?”

“To Evidence needing a delivery-girl and Stephanopoulos deciding she’d better be someone with Falcon experience,” Guleed said. Then, to Molly, “No, thanks, no time for cakes. Well, maybe if you’ve got some of that lemon.” She pulled a manila envelope from under her arm and handed it to Nightingale.

He assessed the weight with trepidation. “Paperwork?” And here he was, without a constable to foist it on.

“Mostly,” she said. “Is your house guest around?”

Varvara Sidorovna accepted the cake but declined to review the evidence receipt in detail. “Where would I be if I couldn’t trust the honest members of the Metropolitan Police?” she asked, signing the receipt with a flourish. “What’ve you brought me?”

“Clothes, mostly,” said Guleed. “Anything they’ve deemed necessary for the trial. They’re still analyzing a few packs of cigarettes--where’d you find that brand? The techs have never heard of it.”

“It’s a designer blend,” Varvara Sidorovna said with a bright grin. “If you have the opportunity, do sneak a smoke. I promise it’s worth it.”

Nightingale sighed. “I would advise you not to take her up on that.”

“You don’t need to tell me that, governor. They’ve also made copies of these.” She slid half a dozen glossy black-and-white images from the pile, fanning them out over the table. “We sent them to Dr. Walid for his opinion. He says they’re old technology.”

Nightingale pulled the nearest sheet across the table. It was the cross-section of a brain, familiar from all the MRI scans Abdul had subjected him to, but grainier than he was accustomed to.

“Oh,” said Varvara Sidorovna, leaning over his shoulder. “I haven’t seen those in years. Good times. 1969, if I recall correctly. Maybe 1970--things got a bit fuzzy around then.”

Guleed made a note. “These are yours? Were you under medical observation?”

“No, they’d just started experimenting with brain imaging,” she said, tracing the white outline with one finger. “I volunteered. I’d been experimenting too, you see, and after some of the things I’d ingested, radioisotopes didn’t seem like such a stretch.”

“And you kept them?”

“Copies, as a conversation piece,” said Varvara Sidorovna. “Goes over great at a certain kind of party. ‘Come back to my room, let me show you my parietal lobe.’ ”

“Right,” said Guleed. “Well, they’re all yours. If you want anything we’ve withheld, you can put a request in. Inspector Nightingale will have to sign off on it, though.”

“Let’s see what you have first,” Nightingale said, a bit wary. He’d sent Peter and Lesley to examine the contents of Varvara Sidorovna’s flat. They’d reported nothing of magical significance, and he hadn’t questioned it at the time, but in retrospect he was disinclined to trust any report he’d ever had from Lesley.

“Yes, sir. I don’t suppose you know any spells to unload the boot of an Asbo?”

“I do,” said Varvara Sidorovna brightly.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to make do with brute force,” Nightingale said. “Lead the way.”

There were six neatly-labeled cardboard boxes. Nightingale opened and inspected each himself. Four proved to contain clothes and shoes, which Molly claimed at once. Judging from the look she gave the stack of silk blouses over her arm, the wrinkles were not long for this world.

Varvara Sidorovna seemed disappointed when he reacted to the pile of bras and panties without so much as a raised eyebrow, but she was delighted at the contents of the fifth box. “Good, I was worried about these. Some of them would go for a pretty penny now if I cared to sell them.”

“Is that _Electric Ladyland_?” Guleed asked, pulling out an album covered rather ostentatiously in naked women.

“Mmm,” said Varvara Sidorovna with a reminiscent smile. “Bought that one the day it came out. I haven’t listened to it on vinyl in years, though—I know people who go on about the sound, but you can’t beat the convenience of digital. Except for that irritating tendency it has to disintegrate.” She paused. “I don’t suppose you’ve brought me my phone, have you?”

Guleed shook her head. “It fell apart. The lab couldn’t recover anything useful.”

“Such an unfortunate accident,” Nightingale said, to Varvara Sidorovna’s amusement. “I suppose we’ll have to go back to vodka-fueled interrogations to get any useful intelligence from you.”

“I look forward to it.”

“I don’t think that’s a Met-approved procedure, sir,” said Guleed, absorbed in the album’s track list. “You’ve got a turntable here, haven’t you?”

“In the reading room. What’s in the last box?”

“Personal effects and sundries.” Guleed let the album slide back into the box with evident reluctance.

“Let’s have it, then,” he said, opening his pocketknife. Varvara Sidorovna stiffened, and he raised an eyebrow. “If I may.”

“Be my guest.” She sounded far too casual about it, so he cut off the packing tape with more than his usual care.

The contents had the sterile smell of the evidence lab, and underneath it the faintest smell of yeast and wet dog. Or wolf. The _vestigia_ faded as soon as he’d noted them, however, and he felt no hesitation in pulling out the contents.

A white envelope with a stack of photographs. Two were much older, the first a young couple standing stiffly in formal clothing, the second the same couple flanking a small child of indeterminate gender. The others were square Polaroids featuring Varvara Sidorovna and a curly-haired man, mostly black-and-white but a handful in faded color.

A small collection of dog-eared letters in Cyrillic. These would have been copied and translated—he would ask for details later. A wooden box whose lid slid off to reveal a heap of jewelry, gold chains with the glitter of tiny diamonds and the occasional chunk of turquoise and rose quartz. A plain gold ring, polished to a soft shine. A necklace with a small, tarnished silver cross as its pendant. Most of what _vestigia_ there were clung to these, and he found himself relaxing.

“And there you are,” he said at last, handing over the box. The tension went out of her, too, as she began to pack it back up. He glanced toward the table where Molly was clearing the plates and noted with some interest that the brain scans had disappeared.

“Sahra,” he said. Guleed gave a guilty start as she looked up from the albums. “Are they expecting you back at the station soon?”

“Once I’m done here,” she said, guarded.

“Not immediately, then. Varvara Sidorovna, perhaps you might show PC Guleed how to use the gramophone. I don’t suppose that’s something they teach this generation.”

Guleed looked at him as though she thought this was laying it on a bit thick, as Peter might say, but Nightingale was a superior officer and had just offered her unexpected rec time, so she wouldn’t let herself be provoked. Varvara Sidorovna gave him a bemused look but only said, “Come along, dear.” The albums went with them, along with the box of sundries.

It took a few moments for the music to start up. He waited through the first track until blaring static gave way to a slow, bluesy beat under the vocals, and then he got out his phone.

“Abdul,” he said, “do you have a moment?”

Walid let out the abstracted noise that meant he was busy but willing to make time. “Is this about the sheep? Because if he’s already put the entrails in the same bag as the rest of the corpse, I can make do.”

Nightingale blinked. “The—no, I’m not aware of any sheep.”

“Peter rang in a find out in Herefordshire. He asked me to do a necropsy. I’ve already sent a team out to collect it.”

“That’s very good of you,” he said, adding this to the list of discussion points for the next conversation with his apprentice, “but actually I’ve rung about a set of brain scans I was told you’ve been looking at.”

“Oh, yes—the SPECT.”

“The what?”

“Single-photon emission computed tomography. It’s not the technique I would have chosen for monitoring hyperthaumaturgical degradation, but the lesions are clear enough.”

_Single-photon emission…._ At least this did not _sound_ like a term he would have been expected to pick up over the years. Then he processed Walid’s actual point. “Hyperthaumaturgical degradation?”

“I suppose there might be another cause for the damage, but considering the source….”

“Quite.” His eyes cut toward the door of the reading room, where Jimi Hendrix was trying to get to the other side of town. (Nightingale had been isolated in the ‘seventies, not dead.) “How advanced would you say it is?”

“They’re older films,” Walid said. Nightingale recognized the usual scientific hedging. Extol the method all you want—and Nightingale was a follower of Newton, he gave respect where it was due—he’d found it gave clear answers about as often as good old Gerald of Wales. “Not as detailed as I’d like. And it would depend somewhat on the age and general health of the subject.”

“Female,” Nightingale offered. “Forty-eight or forty-nine.”

“Quite advanced then, I would say. Likely suffering from some degree of motor impairment and likely other, less obvious symptoms. If she’s a practitioner, I’d advise her not to attempt so much as a werelight.”

“Ah. That is interesting. Thank you, Abdul.”

“Not at all.”

“Do I want to know more about the sheep?”

Walid gave a soft laugh. “As long as you can avoid smelling it, very probably. I’ll be in touch.”

He spent most of the afternoon after Guleed’s departure researching sheep disembowelment. It was about as useful an exercise as he might have expected. “At least it wasn’t either of the children, thank God,” he told Molly, who’d set a cup of tea at his elbow. “I’d suggest removing mutton from the menu when Peter returns.”

She nodded and left him to it, then returned twenty minutes later to remove the teacup and inform him someone had phoned for him.

“Peter,” he said, “what’s this about a sheep?”

Peter had not phoned about the sheep.

He’d just gotten off the phone with Pollock at the Department of Professional Standards when Varvara Sidorovna came downstairs. She was wearing a smartly-tailored grey skirt suit and a midnight blue blouse as though it gave her some satisfaction to do so. He absorbed this with the back corner of his mind; the remainder of it was focused on something far more important. “Your employer. Why would he instruct Lesley to reach out to us?”

She blinked. He saw her take this in, considering. “To the Folly?”

“To _Peter_ ,” he said, and if there was an edge to his voice he could hardly be blamed for that.

She sat down in a nearby armchair. “I haven’t been anywhere near his plans for months. You should know, you’ve been sitting on top of me this entire time. Even before then, it’s not as though he liked to ring me up and talk tactics.”

“No,” Nightingale said, very softly, “but you’ve interacted directly with him more than anyone else I’ve been able to interview. What might he be trying to do?”

“Provoke a reaction,” she replied without hesitation. “He does love to stir the pot. But you know that, Nightingale, and you know I’m not giving you anything specific on him that you don’t already have. But there are limited possibilities. Is Peter the one whose reaction he wants?”

It was not out of the realm of possibility that the Faceless Man was involved in the recent abductions, but if he wanted Peter off the case he’d certainly chosen an indirect route to take. Nightingale suppressed a shiver with the force of long habit. Thank God he’d thought to contact Beverley Brook. “I doubt it.”

“He likes to find people’s pressure points,” said Varvara Sidorovna. Her voice had gone flat. “Lesley is one of Peter’s. That’s obvious enough. And what are yours, Inspector?”

If he wanted a reaction, he could hardly do better than to threaten Nightingale’s sole remaining apprentice with the one who’d betrayed them. A subtle threat, of course. Peter might not even see it as one, but Nightingale could hardly do otherwise. He also could not take off at a moment’s notice for North Herefordshire, not if he was leaving a dangerous practitioner kicking up her heels at the Folly and the bloody spoils of Ettersburg buried under the firing range.

“Yes, thank you,” Nightingale said vaguely, then wandered down to the kitchen.

Molly was kneeling on the floor, engaged in some sort of silent consultation with Toby. It might have been about anything from her stroganoff recipe to the deep secrets of the fae, but the moment Nightingale stepped inside she shot upright. “Molly,” he said. “If you have a moment. Do you recall those papers I gave you for safekeeping? The ones I last asked for before Peter arrived.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded.

“I’m afraid I’ll need them again.”

She made her way to the cupboard where she kept her recipes. Some of these were older than Nightingale himself, ancient notebooks with recommendations for kedgeree and dubious jellies. Some were more recent; at Peter and Lesley’s encouragement, she’d taken to ordering cookbooks online, and now the shelves were stuffed with glossy hardcovers.

She reached one long, pale hand for a slim volume on the top shelf. It was battered and stained, the title long since faded past legibility, and when she opened it several pages pulled loose from the spine. Between two of these she had tucked the folded piece of ancient graph paper. He told himself the brownish splotches were at least as likely to be beef gravy as they were to be human blood.

“Thank you, Molly,” he said, and when she passed the paper into his hand he clasped her fingers gently in his. “I don’t believe I’ll come down to dinner tonight.” He felt her gaze between his shoulderblades as he walked away.

He carried the graph paper into his room, locked the door behind him with an ancient key and a quick fourth-order spell, and sat down at the desk to decipher the crabbed handwriting.

Every time he did this, he told himself he ought to make a clean copy of these notes. And every time, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, because then he would have to destroy the originals. Redundancy was the enemy of secrecy.

It was a long and unpleasant night. On the whole, he thought the entrails might have been preferable.

He woke in the hour before dawn. Toby was snuffling around outside his door, and it seemed as good a time as any for a walk. The air was crisp and clean, remarkably so for a London summer, and he breathed it in like an anesthetic.

On coming back inside, he filled Toby’s water bowl and watched him lap it up. Around them, the Folly was startlingly still. It had housed upwards of two dozen policemen in its heyday, between the wars. He’d been abroad more often than not at the time, but they’d kept a small room for him on the first floor, and every time he came back he’d sink again into the familiar rhythms: the pattern of scorch marks on the ceiling above his sagging bed, the creak of stairs just outside when old Gladwell toddled up to bed after midnight, the odd shouts of laughter from the laboratory and the heavy, rhythmic thumps of the target range.

It had been quieter after the war. There’d been fewer of them left in residence, of course, but besides that he’d been walking around like a man with cotton stuffed in his ears, as though the guns at Ettersburg had done a number on his hearing as well as his left shoulder. The cloud over his senses had faded with time, but without Casterbrook sending its annual crop of fresh young things the life had gone out of the Folly. All the others had died, or gone into retirement, and the staff with them. And then there was just him and Molly.

They had lived alone for so long, the real wonder was how quickly they’d adjusted to having apprentices underfoot, to Peter slouching downstairs in his sweatshirt and fighting over the last of the coffee with Lesley.

He bent down to scratch Toby’s neck where the hair was squashed down under the collar. “Good boy,” he murmured, and looked up to find Molly watching from the doorway.

“Hello,” he said.

She regarded him with solemn, fearful eyes.

“Thank you. I’ll be asking for this again in eleven years or so. I hope.” She did not return his smile, and he sighed. “You know how this works. I may be some time. I’ve left a letter for Peter on my desk. If it goes badly—” He stopped, considered what Peter would say if he gave these particular instructions. Then considered the consequences if he did not. “If it goes badly, and if I don’t come out, Varvara Sidorovna cannot leave the Folly alive.”

Molly flinched. More than that, she _cringed_ away from him—he’d only seen that once, the very first time he had repaired these wards. Nightingale had asked her to help him reconstruct the last invention of David Mellenby. It had not gone well for either of them.

“I know what I’m asking,” he said. “I know you don’t want to, and I’m so very sorry to put this on you.” He reached out to touch her cheek, half-hidden behind the dark curtain of her hair. “Molly, I can’t trust this to anyone else.”

She was still like stone under his hand, and then she nodded once, refusing to look at him.

“Thank you. My dear old friend.”

It was a lonely walk down the back stairs and past the armory. The hall beyond it was dank and unlit; ordinarily he’d have conjured a werelight, but he wanted to leave any magic until the last possible moment, just in case he woke Varvara Sidorovna. He’d be relying on Molly to keep her well away, but he didn’t want to make this more difficult than it had to be. He’d have much preferred to do this once she was safely in prison, but it no longer seemed prudent to wait. She might very well get a closer glimpse into these wards than he’d like, but if he succeeded today, they would be impassable for over a decade, and he could breathe easy again.

But not quite yet.

He passed through the wooden door, closing it softly behind him. At the end of the hall stood a hingeless steel rectangle embossed with several circles.

Nightingale stood in front of that door, head bowed, for the space of three heartbeats. Then with quick, precise movements he took his pocket-knife into his right hand, opened it, and sliced a long, deep line across his left palm.

As the blood welled up, he pressed it to the center of the innermost circle and spoke a word.

The door began to open.


	2. Chapter 2

It opened, but not willingly. He had teased apart the intricate lacework of David Mellenby’s last and greatest work half a dozen times, and Nightingale knew how the vital fluid ought to flow through the twists and turns of the _formae_. At first they welcomed him in, warm and familiar with a hint of iodine and starched linen—the faint remnants of David’s _signare_. But then they warped and turned against him, burning and pushing like a body fighting an infection. He pushed back in turn. The wards were weak now, overdue for their maintenance, and when he put enough force behind it his blood was enough to carry him through.

The fabric of the door dissolved under his hand. He stumbled forward and fell to his knees, coughing in the stale air as the door reformed itself and sealed him in. The cut on his palm burned dully.

The entrance spell had always been the easy part. “ _Humores vitae ipsi clavis sunt_ ,” David’s notes had said; it was simple as Nightingale’s blood, freely given. Or it ought to have been.

When he’d caught his breath, he shook off his confusion and called up a werelight. The simple _forma_ steadied him, and he got to his feet.

He’d been here before. He didn’t trouble to look around—there wasn’t much to see, and he had a job to finish.

The blood from his palm was purple-black in the werelight. There was not quite enough of it; he gritted his teeth and drew the blade parallel to the first cut. Then he pressed the torn flesh against the door, let out a long breath, and cleared his mind. Now for the difficult part.

Spells were generally classified up to the fifteenth order, with a few rare exceptions above that. (There was also a noticeable gap at twelve. David had tried to explain his theory about twelfth order spells once. It was a long explanation that relied heavily on abstract mathematical concepts for which Nightingale had no time or patience, but he rather wished, now, that he’d paid better attention. Peter would have found it interesting.)

This was not a fifteenth order spell. It was not even a spell of higher order than that, precisely, but a careful lattice of spells at lower levels, which the caster had to hold steady until all were complete, fueling each _forma_ with the blood from his veins. It was painstaking work at the best of times, nearly unbearable when he was already distracted. He pushed all thoughts of Peter, of David, of Lesley and Molly and Varvara Sidorovna and the bloody Faceless Man from his mind—and focused.

It would not be enough. He could tell the moment he’d tied off the second spell. His offering was being rejected, something in his blood unacceptable to the wards, the key warping the lock. David would have told him to stop; Peter would certainly have paused to work this out. But the _formae_ were already trembling and unstable in the back of his mind, and he could see no way out but through.

As he shaped the _formae_ for the third spell, he felt the first two begin to buckle. He didn’t know what would happen if they collapsed and had no desire to find out. Without looking, he brought the knife up again and drew it through the thickest flesh of his left forearm, tearing through wool and linen and skin to pull out the vital fluid. He pressed harder against the door, blood dripping past his elbow, and tied off the third spell.

For an instant of utter clarity, he saw the wards opening like a chasm beneath his feet, the roiling horror of the death that had paid for them exposed like a raw nerve. And then the spells did not so much collapse as implode.

He thought, as it began, that he ought to try to record the sensation in case Peter found his description of interest. Then it occurred to him that this wasn’t the appropriate topic to fixate on, just at the moment, and then it became difficult to think of anything at all.

When his head cleared, Nightingale was splayed on his back with a stabbing pain between his eyes and a horrific itch from elbow to wrist. It was cold, or at least he was shivering; that might have been reaction. It was most certainly dark. He’d lost the werelight somewhere around the beginning of the second spell.

Without bothering to sit up, he attempted to conjure a new one. It flared briefly into life, sickly and orange, and went out.

He closed his eyes and swore in six languages, several of them dead. Then he closed his hand, swallowed, and whispered “ _Lux_ ” aloud as he let his fingers fall flat.

This time, it held. The relief was briefly overwhelming. When he was certain it wasn’t about to disappear on him, he rolled slowly onto his left side, careful not to jar his arm. Breathing slowly and deeply, he pushed himself upright.

The most immediate problem was the blood smeared down his arm. It was already thick and tacky, so he must have been stunned for more than a few minutes—not good, but if it was already clotted he hadn’t sliced open an artery. He shrugged with excruciating care out of the remnants of his suit jacket, then peeled the tattered shirt sleeve away from his arm. He considered whether it would be better to leave it alone—every thought process seemed to take about twice as long as it ought to—then wrapped the jacket close to the elbow and used his teeth and trembling right hand to tie it off.

He bit his lip against a wave of nausea. There, the first thing down. The next was finding a way out—or, failing that, of sealing himself in. The wards were all but useless now that he’d punched a hole straight through them, and little as he wanted to die alone and underground he’d considered that particular outcome every time he’d come here. But he couldn’t work out how he might raise the wards again.

Molly would be frantic. The aftershocks of the collapsing spells scraped like a raw nerve in the back of his mind; there was no possibility that she had missed it.

Nightingale leaned his shoulder against the door and was considering his options, none of them promising, when a loud, insistent ringing began in his ears. He jerked his head around, looking for the source, and didn’t notice until too late that the wards had begun to stir fitfully. Before he could react, a hard, warm object slammed into his shoulder, and the body it was attached to toppled over him with a vicious stream of what had to be profanity in a language he did _not_ speak.

Startled, he let the werelight flicker out.

Another appeared almost instantly. “What is this place?” demanded Varvara Sidorovna.

“That,” he had the presence of mind to say faintly, “is none of your business.”

“I’d call it very much my business, now that I’m here.” She levered herself upright. She was close enough that he could see the bleary puffiness under her eyes—she’d been asleep, then, and hadn’t had time to do more than throw on a blouse and pair of slacks. The werelight brightened, and the ringing sound intensified. She made a pained face. “Can you shut that up?”

“Ah,” he said, glancing in sudden understanding at the bracelet on her wrist. “If I may.”

She extended her hand. With a touch of his fingertip and a word, the clasp disintegrated, and the alarm fell silent as the bracelet slid to the floor. She rubbed reflexively at her arm.

Nightingale was struggling to reassess the situation with another, unexpected piece on the board. “Whey _are_ you here?”

“Your housekeeper sent me after you. She’s terrifying—has anyone told you that?”

“On more than one occasion.” Interesting. Nightingale supposed that if Varvara Sidorovna was trapped in here with him, Molly had at least followed his instructions not to let her leave the Folly alive.

She floated the werelight a few inches above their heads, looking around with wary curiosity. “Well, this is—not what I expected.” The glow cast flickering shadows high on the wall as it fell on row upon row of filing cabinets. She stood up, the light moving with her, and made for the nearest drawer.

“Don’t touch that,” he said sharply, then levered himself to his feet with an effort that left him dizzy.

She raised an eyebrow. “What are you going to do about it?”

He reacted without thought, and though her eyes widened at the first sign of his intentions he was still fast enough to catch her off guard. Nothing more complicated than _impello_ , but it sent her flying across the room to slam into the cabinets opposite them. They rocked back with a dull metallic clang. Before her feet had touched the floor, she’d come back at him with a binding spell—too experienced by half to try anything more destructive in an enclosed space. He ought to have parried it. Instead he found himself fumbling for the counterspell, the _formae_ slipping through his grasp, and when she released him his legs buckled.

“Shit,” she said, and he must have lost his grip on her, because then she was bending over him, one hand under his chin. “What’s wrong with you?”

Her werelight bobbed up between them. Nightingale blinked against the sudden glare. “What are you doing?”

“Checking your pupil reaction, if you’ll stop throwing spells around long enough for me to make sure you haven’t had a stroke. Raise both your hands to shoulder height.” He raised them to shield his eyes instead, and she caught his left wrist. “Or alternatively, bleeding to death. What’ve you done to yourself?”

He sighed, the adrenaline seeping out of him and leaving only exhaustion in its wake. “I was trying to get out.”

Her hands were on his arm, prodding with a great deal more competence than gentleness at the wound. “Doesn’t look fatal.”

“Your concern is touching.”

Varvara Sidorovna grinned, a sudden flash of white teeth in the werelight. Her face was very pale. “And your sense of sarcasm is intact. Take each of my index fingers in either hand, squeeze tight.”

“I have not had a stroke,” Nightingale protested, but it seemed easier to play along, so he did as she said. Her hands were cool and smooth in his. “It’s just disorientation.”

“From the blood loss or the demon trap?” She peered into his eyes, uncomfortably close. “If that’s what it was. Didn’t feel quite like any I’ve met. Whose handiwork?”

“From both, I imagine,” he said, ignoring the other question.

Her fingers slipped out of his grasp as she sat back on her heels. She glanced over her shoulder at the smooth, bare surface of the door. “All right. How do I get us out of here?”

“You don’t,” he said. His tongue was leaden in his mouth. “I’m the only one who can open it, and I have demonstrably not done so.”

“Far be it from me to question your abilities, Nightingale, but I _have_ cast a spell or two hundred in my time. And I did manage to follow you in here.”

“No,” he said, attempting to be patient both with the explanation and his own spinning head, “I mean that’s how the wards are designed.”

“Do tell.”

“You’ll understand my reluctance.”

She looked unimpressed. “Fine, no peeking at your very important filing system, I get it. But if you won’t tell me what you’re hiding down here, you can at least tell me why we can’t leave.”

“I suppose it won’t matter, one way or another,” he said, jerking his chin at the jacket wrapped around his arm. “In the pocket.”

She felt around until she found the graph paper, now certainly stained with blood as well as beef gravy. The werelight floated closer as she unfolded it, frowning down at David’s handwriting. “What is this?”

“Notes on the creation of these wards.”

“It’s in Latin,” she said, after a few moments’ squinting. “And I’m damned rusty. Fill me in.”

“Where did you learn it, anyhow?” he asked. “Surely Greek—”

She snorted, turning to the next page. “They barely taught us enough Greek to get by. It was war time, remember. No overpriced public schools for the 365th Special Regiment. The Latin I picked up here once I started practicing again. Made it easier to get materials. But I can’t make heads or tails of this—what’s that?” She pushed the paper under his nose, pointing at a small drawing in the corner. In the lines of the sketch he could still read David’s sense of whimsy; a windowsill with a glass jar perched on top, a funnel over the neck and a pair of flies inside. One was buzzing around uselessly, while the other floated on its back, X’s across its eyes.

Nightingale’s mouth twisted. That metaphor had never seemed quite so apt. “This was drawn by an old school friend of mine. When we were at that overpriced public school of ours, we used to put out bell glasses full of vinegar to catch flies. They’d come in through the wide end of the funnel, then drown when they couldn’t find their way out again.”

“I take it we’re meant to be the flies,” said Varvara Sidorovna. “You can be the dead one.”

“The idea,” Nightingale said, in the tone he took with Peter when they had strayed too far from the topic of instruction, “is that no ward or demon trap or lock can be made absolutely impenetrable. These spells are designed to funnel all the weaknesses in one direction. They are very effective. Renew the wards, and they should hold from either side for eleven years, give or take. Or at least, I haven’t found any way past them.” And he had been trying since 1946.

“Hmm.” Varvara Sidorovna was looking at him, now, and not at the papers. “Not a demon trap, then.”

“Not quite.”

“It felt like one.”

He closed his eyes. “There are certain similarities in construction. There were—sacrifices required.” When he looked back at her, she was still watching him steadily. He swallowed. “The trouble is that the wards do still need maintenance, and the way they’re built—it has to be started from inside, each spell sealed off as you work your way out.”

“You’ve done it before?”

“A number of times, yes. It’s difficult, but manageable, if you have the right materials.” He reached out to tap a sentence toward the bottom of the page, printed in heavy letters and underlined for additional emphasis. “ ‘The vital fluid itself is the key.’ The lock was built to open for my blood. Which, as you can see—” He waved his arm in the air, then winced when it pulled at the cut.

“But it won’t open,” she said flatly.

“No. I’ve no idea why. My _formae_ were all correct, I’d stake my life on it. I used far more blood than I should have needed. Something must have gone wrong with the wards.”

“Well,” said Varvara Sidorovna. “Damn.” She tilted her head back, considering. “How long before that apprentice of yours finds his way back and starts looking for you?”

“Molly won’t let him down here,” Nightingale said at once. He knew this, bone-deep. “I’ve left him instructions. If I don’t make it out—he’ll manage. The wards will fall apart eventually, but they aren’t the only line of defense.”

“ _He’ll_ manage? What’s your plan for us?”

“Oh,” he replied, keeping his tone light—not difficult, when he felt as though his head might float away at any moment. “I imagine we’ll starve to death.”

“Well, bollocks to that,” she said, springing to her feet. “I didn’t survive a German POW camp to rot underground without a fight.” And before he could stop her, she’d put her palm flat on the bloodied door.

The resulting implosion was not—quite—so physically violent as the last. It was psychological more than anything else, a shockwave of guilt and despair that left his bones rattling and Varvara Sidorovna huddled, panting, on the floor.

“Fuck,” she said at last.

He let his head fall back against the cabinet behind him with a hollow, metallic rattle. “Quite.”

She sat up reluctantly, features haggard in the werelight. “Your housekeeper must have felt that. Won’t she come after us?”

“She’d be here now if she could. The wards are inimical to her kind.”

Varvara Sidorovna narrowed her eyes. “Her kind?” Then, when he shook his head, “All right, it doesn’t matter. But if she won’t send Peter in, and if she can’t come herself, why did I get to be so lucky?”

“I suppose as far as Molly is concerned, you’re expendable.”

She let out a harsh laugh, as though it hurt her throat. “I’ve heard that before.”

He let his head fall to one side, watching her curiously. “Those scans you had taken in the ’sixties showed severe degradation.”

Her voice had gone distant and hollow. “I’m aware.”

“From your training?” He’d heard stories—they all had—of the Soviet special regiments and the alarmingly high death rates of their recruits. Particularly, though he did not learn this until much later, of the women.

“No.” It was her turn to swallow. He could see the shadows of her throat working in the werelight. “Plenty of others, of course. Strokes, aneurysms, I saw a few of them happen. But I was fine, at least until Brynsk. Stretched myself too far avoiding capture. Wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I lost some fine motor control.” His gaze dropped to her hand, which trembled as though in memory. “I didn’t touch magic again for over two decades. Thought I’d probably drop dead if I tried.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Literally,” she said, the ghost of her usual smile flitting across her face. “I’ve told you already. August Bank Holiday, 1966.” She raised her hand, palm flat, and held it rock-steady in front of her.

His mouth dropped open very slightly. “The reverse aging—it reversed that damage, as well?”

“As well as I can work it out,” she said, stretching forward to rest her elbows on her knees. “It wasn’t instantaneous. I noticed that I was getting younger before I had those scans done. It was another couple of years before I thought there might be other effects, when the tremors faded away. When I realized what was happening, I started practicing again. Small things at first.” The werelight pulsed brighter for a moment. “Then I found my way into the _demimonde_. Got my hands on a few books. It came back easier than I might have expected. Like riding a bicycle, you know.” Now she grinned properly. “Or sex after a long dry spell.”

Nightingale shook his head in astonishment. “I’d no idea. Does it work on mundane damage as well?”

She shrugged. “Well enough. I’ve had scars fade faster than they ought to. You haven’t noticed?”

His right hand strayed to his chest, over the spot where a bullet had punched into him the previous spring. His recovery had felt slow and tortuous at the time, but he had to admit it had been an improvement on his convalescence after the war. He’d put it down to advancements in medicine since the ‘forties, and his treatment the second time around had been fairly straightforward, but—

“Oh,” he said blankly. “Oh, damn.”

Varvara Sidorovna snapped to attention. “What?”

“It’s not the wards that have gone wrong. It’s the blood.”

“How do you mean?”

“I was shot a year ago and had a number of transfusions,” he said, tone flattening as what hope he’d had for escape dissolved. “It’s possible the _humores vitae_ is not as pure as it once was. No longer quite my blood, or at least not the blood the spell would expect.”

“Well,” said Varvara Sidorovna. “That’s unfortunate.”

They lapsed into silence. Nightingale let his head drop back as he forced himself to consider the situation properly for the first time. He would trust to Peter’s ingenuity to solve the problem in Herefordshire, and to Beverley Brook to keep him safe in the meantime; he would trust Molly to stop Peter following Nightingale into the flytrap. But when Peter had returned to London, what then? The wards were weakened to the breaking point, the Faceless Man was still unidentified, Peter’s progress had been astonishing but there was only so much that could be managed in a year and a half, and Nightingale was not as relentless or as desperate as the Soviet Army. But perhaps he ought to have pushed harder, prepared Peter more thoroughly. He had survived two altercations with the Faceless Man, but there was no guarantee that a third—

“The Latin,” said Varvara Sidorovna suddenly. “Was that singular or plural?”

He blinked away visions of Peter collapsed and convulsing from overexertion, of the front door to the Folly blown off its hinges, of Lesley grinning at him from a perfect, lifeless mockery of her old face, of Molly pressing a white hand to her red and bloodied mouth— “What?”

“ _Humores_ ,” she said again, cutting through his spiraling thoughts. “Is that feminine singular or masculine plural?”

Nightingale let out a disbelieving huff of laughter, hoping it didn’t sound as close to the edge of hysteria as he felt. “You want to argue about noun declensions?”

“No,” said Varvara Sidorovna, “I want to get us out of here. Is that from the original spell, _humores vitae_?”

He pulled himself together. “Yes, I do apologize. Peter would be shocked. The blood loss, you understand. I should have said the _humores vitae_ aren’t as pure as _they_ once—”

“It’s not your blood loss I’m concerned about. Vital fluids, plural. Does the spell actually say which one?”

“Ah,” said Nightingale, less intelligently than he would have liked. “I suppose not. One could argue that blood is the most vital of all humors.”

“That all depends on who you talk to,” said Varvara Sidorovna.

‘Whom’, he almost said, since they’d been speaking of declensions. He would have said it to Peter, if only to get a long-suffering sigh, but this was Varvara Sidorovna, and her grin was back. Now it was decidedly predatory.

Nightingale closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she was still waiting with her clever, catlike smile. “If I’ve misinterpreted you, I hope you’ll put it down to my less than ideal condition at the moment.”

“Why, Thomas,” she said, eyebrows raised, “I’m shocked. I only meant to ask whether blood was the only possibility, though if you’ve another suggestion to make—”

“I know what he used to make the wards,” he said very precisely, “because not long before he raised them, he asked me for a vial of blood.” Nightingale had been curious, of course, but at the time David had been so furtive and withdrawn he hadn’t wanted to press. He’d assumed if David was back at his experiments, it was a good sign. If he’d only known what David intended—but that was past and done, and the results were unfortunately quite present.

She snatched David’s notes from the floor and flipped through them until she came to that sentence he’d indicated earlier. “Here. I can’t read this scribbling, I don’t know how you managed. But it is plural? Vital fluids. Whoever wrote this, how precise would he have been?”

“Very,” Nightingale had to admit. “So multiple fluids, I concede the point.”

“And he only asked for your blood?”

He hesitated. “Yes.” She narrowed her eyes. “Though he would have had—access—to others.”

Her lips quirked. “If I’ve misinterpreted you—”

If there was any justice in the world, he’d have aged out of blushing sometime before his ninth decade, but fate was not so kind. “I suspect you haven’t.”

“Well, then.” Varvara Sidorovna crossed her legs and sat forward expectantly.

His head swimming, Nightingale said, “I suppose Peter would say it’s worth the effort of an experiment.”

“Oh, _do_ consider Peter, if you find that helpful,” she said with unnecessary enthusiasm.

He chose to ignore this and took refuge in formality. “You’ll forgive me. It may be some little time before I can muster that effort, between the aforementioned blood loss and the less-than-inspiring atmosphere.”

She shrugged. “The first one, I can’t do much about. The second—” And she laid a warm hand on his thigh.

He began to laugh again, quite unintentionally. She waited him out. “Very well, Varvara Sidorovna,” he managed, “if you—”

“Really, Thomas. When I’m trapped underground with a man and planning to unbutton his trousers, I think he can call me Varya.”

Nightingale smiled. “Very well, Varya. Whatever it is you have in mind, you’re more than welcome—oh.”

He’d given and received blowjobs in less conducive situations, difficult as that might be to believe. It took him longer to respond than it might have done, but then he was cold, possibly concussed, and still bleeding sluggishly from the arm. Also, in the small corner of his mind he could spare for such things, rather embarrassed.

On the other side of the scale, she was remarkably good at this, and he didn’t think that was just his recent drought speaking. Her mouth was deft and practiced, her hands eager and curious. At first she had only pushed his trousers and the hem of his shirt to the side, but as she found a rhythm and he began to stir more fully she let her palms trail up the sensitive skin of his waist, then back down to his hip, a slow, light counterpoint to the tight pressure encircling him. When she added a light scrape of nails he groaned, low and startled, and she responded with an amused sound deep in her throat. The vibrations were enough to bring him fully to attention.

When he thought his voice would hold, he ventured, “I should say that I’m not certain this will work.”

She hummed around him. He read it as dismissive. He wanted her to do it again.

“Though I admit there are worse ways to be wrong,” he said, staring at the dim glow on the ceiling, “and if we’re going to die down here anyhow this is preferable to most other ways we could spend our time.”

Varvara Sidorovna curled her tongue pointedly and slid off his cock. “Keep talking,” she said, “and I’ll start to think I’m boring you.”

He snorted, belly pressing up into her palm. It was a delightful sensation. “Not in the least.”

“Good.” Her fingers curled, nails biting into his ribs, and he hissed involuntarily. “Like that? I prefer it a bit rougher, myself. Too bad we’re on a schedule.” She mouthed the last phrase into the soft skin at the join of his hip, her cheek and jaw brushing along his length with each syllable. “There are some variants of _palma_ I’d _love_ to try with someone who has your control. I think you’d appreciate them.” She let her lips trail up his length as she spoke, and the skin prickled tight with reaction up his forearms to his wrists. “I picked up more than just Latin in the ‘seventies, you know. Realized what I’d been missing the first time around. Too busy learning how to take out German bombers.” She reached the tip of him and paused to blow a puff of warm breath along his slit.

He nearly swallowed his tongue. “ _Varya_ ,” he said. He hadn’t intended it as a command, but in trying to avoid an outright plea he overcorrected, and it came out like the double crack of a whip.

She didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, very nice,” she said appreciatively, then swallowed him down.

He stopped trying to stifle the low profanities that wanted to spill out of him. Her thumbs and forefingers rubbed soothing patterns between his lower ribs, then pinched hard. Nightingale sagged backward, trembling from head to toe. “Var—Varya,” he managed.

“Mmm?” Her mouth stopped working, the barest hint of teeth resting on the underside of his cock.

“I should warn you—”

She backed away until her lips just encircled the edge of his foreskin. She cleared her throat. “Handkerchief?”

“Jacket,” he said through clenched teeth. “Other pocket.”

She sat up. He strained without meaning to after the heat of her, chilled and wet as he was in the cold, stale air. As she rooted around in his jacket, her other hand covered him, gentle and firm by turns. It was not as good as her mouth, but he wasn’t about to complain.

“Oh, Christ,” he gasped, lightheaded twice over as she swung one leg over his body, bending toward him so her breasts grazed his chest.

“Ready,” she said, one hand now cupped around the back of his neck while the other worked him. He was about to protest that he was not, quite, when—

At that point he finally lost consciousness outright. He came back to himself slowly, stars still winking behind his eyelids, desperately short of breath. He was flat on his back, Varvara Sidorovna’s hand the only thing keeping his skull from the hard cement, her thighs pressed to either side of his hips.

“All right?” she asked from right beside his ear. The werelight had gone out again, but he didn’t need to see her to imagine the smug look on her face.

He had to swallow several times before he could respond. “I’ll do.”

“Excellent,” she said, though she didn’t trouble to move. “I have what I came for. Or, I suppose, what you—”

“Yes, very clever,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Could I trouble you for a light?”

She helped him sit up, and on the grounds that his dignity had been left far behind he leaned against her until he’d recovered himself. She was frowning down at David’s notes by that time, pursing her lips. He tried not to stare. “You’re going to have to walk me through this,” she said.

“Happily.”

She glanced down at the sodden handkerchief clutched in one hand. “Will this be enough? Because we can try again, but I think it might kill you.”

This was an exaggeration. Probably. “There’s only one way to find out. I warn you, this may be unpleasant.”

“I’m familiar with demon traps,” she said. “I have some idea what I’m getting into.”

Nightingale nodded. “The first spell is a variant of _aer congolare_.” She pressed the handkerchief to the door, and as she did so he felt her magic stir. “Damn,” he said, “hold on a moment.”

She dropped the _formae_ in alarm. “What?”

He began to laugh, hands fumbling unsteadily at his gaping trousers. He was a mess. “Molly’s waiting out there, and I’ve tried her patience quite enough for one day. If you wouldn’t mind?”

She giggled, a throaty and delighted sound that would have gone straight to his cock if he’d had anything left in him, and set about making them both as decent as possible. Which was not very, but at least he was fully clothed again. “All right,” she said, “can we get started?”

“By all means,” Nightingale said, and braced himself.

Unpleasant was an understatement. By the time they’d pried their way out, he was soaked with sweat and trembling again, and Varvara Sidorovna was hardly in a better state. But the wards were secure, and he wouldn’t have to worry about them for another decade. By that time, he hoped to make it Peter’s problem.

They fell through the door at Molly’s feet. She lost no time in scooping him up and dusting him off, though Nightingale noticed she avoided touching his arm or even looking at the blood. “Thank you for finding another way,” he said, very low, for her ears alone. She nodded, turned her face away, and helped him back upstairs.

He managed to avoid a trip to the hospital by letting Varvara Sidorovna stitch him up in the kitchen. “I do have medical training,” she pointed out, cheerful again with a cup of coffee at her elbow and a fresh change of clothes.

“Yes,” he said, eyes falling shut as he tried not to tense his arm. “I’ve been meaning to ask, why on earth did you spend ten years nursing an old man? It doesn’t seem like the ideal choice of career for your temperament.”

“That’s what he hired me to do.” If he’d been more alert, he probably would have heard the note of warning in her tone.

“Well, yes, but you don’t seem like the sort to stay in a dead-end job just for a paycheck.”

She stabbed into his arm without so much as a by-your-leave. He choked down a yelp. From the other end of the kitchen, Molly let out a sharp hiss.

“All right,” Nightingale said, not sure which of them he was reassuring. “I don’t mean to overstep.”

Varvara Sidorovna’s eyes were fixed on the needle. Her movements were quick and precise. “I told you. He likes to find pressure points.”

He watched her face as she worked, but he didn’t press farther.

Everything after that was a painful muddle. DPS had rung him several times that morning, and he spent two hours on the phone dealing with Pollock. In the meantime, Peter had sent a report on his activities in Herefordshire. Nightingale couldn’t bring himself to do more than glance through it before he dragged himself upstairs and fell face-first into bed.

He woke some hours later to find Molly had left dinner out for him. He ate it in the lab, bent over Varvara Sidorovna’s alarm bracelet until it was repaired to his satisfaction.

When he came out again, there was a heavy, sweet smell in the air, and he could hear strains of The Who from the reading room.

Varvara Sidorovna was sitting in one of the wingback chairs, a glass at her elbow and a cigarette between her lips.

“Where did you come by that?” he asked. He did not, he realized, sound as severe as he might have done the day before.

She smiled unrepentantly. “There was a pack stuffed in the toe of one of my shoes. You should speak to that evidence team.”

“I certainly will.”

She saw the bracelet in his hand, sighed, and held up her arm. “Go on, then.”

He leaned over her to fasten the clasp about her wrist. His fingertips brushed her skin, and a spark of magic crackled between them as the spell took hold, the fine hairs on the back of her hand standing on end.

It was done. Nightingale found himself lingering.

“Have a drink,” she said, watching his face. “I’d say we’ve earned it.”

He found he couldn’t argue. He poured for himself and settled in a chair opposite her, taking his first sip as the album shifted to the next track.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said after a moment’s companionable silence, “about what you’re keeping down in that basement.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” she said. “And about some rumors that were floating around after the war. After Ettersburg.”

“Varvara Sidorovna,” said Nightingale, “I think it would be best for everyone concerned if you stopped your speculation right there.”

She arched an eyebrow, curling her feet underneath her in the chair. “If you say so, Thomas. Whatever you have down there, I’m impressed you’ve kept it quiet so long. Though it’s not surprising. Those are the most complicated wards I’ve ever seen. How did you manage to work them out from those notes?”

“Hemomancy.” Her mouth went slack, the butt of the cigarette drooping. It took her a moment to get over the astonishment. He took the opportunity to move the conversation in a different direction. “Among the many messages I missed during our adventure,” he said, “was one informing us your trial is set to begin in two weeks.”

She stretched in her seat to show she’d recovered her composure. Her feet were bare. “Ah, good. A change of scenery.”

“You look remarkably content for someone facing a decade or more in prison,” he commented.

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll let me out before too long. Good behavior, you know.” She blew out a thick plume of smoke. Her fingers around the cigarette were long and very thin. “And I don’t see the point in worrying. We’re beautiful, dangerous, and functionally immortal. Why not enjoy it?”

“When you put it that way,” Nightingale said. She looked over at him. Without breaking eye contact, he drained his glass.

A feline grin spread across her face. Very deliberately, she took a last slow drag off the cigarette and dropped it, hissing, into her drink. “You have shit vodka anyway,” she said, and before he was halfway across the room she’d risen to meet him.

He paused with his hand at her hip, distracted by the lyrics. “Whose generation, exactly?”

She laughed, and he stepped forward to catch it in his mouth with the heady taste of smoke.

 

_Things they do look awful cold  
I hope I die before I get old._


End file.
